Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
“It’s always been your choice, V,” Elena had said after making a Scrabble move that earned her triple points—to his curses. “Chair or legs, all I care about is that you’re happy.”
She was the one who’d asked him to consider vampirism in the first place; yes, the final call had been his and his alone, with no pressure from her, but guilt still sat heavy in her gut. “I hate that you’re in pain. It’s not what I promised you.”
“I dunno, maybe it’s to make up for years of feeling pretty much nothing and complaining about it. Fate decided to bitch-slap me.”
To say that Vivek’s sense of humor was dark was a major understatement.
Illium, who’d been leaning over one of the multiple screens on which Vivek had queued up satellite images, gave her a careful look, the aged gold of his eyes weighing up her state.
To this day, it gave her a little start each time she noticed his eyelashes were black dipped in blue. Add to this his wicked smile and his willingness to meet mortals on their own playing field and it was no wonder Bluebell had the most vocal fans out of the Seven.
“I got snacks.” He nodded at the tray set to one side.
“Sara made me bacon, and chocolate chip pancakes.”
“Stop bragging.” Vivek scowled, but that was his normal state of being. “Last time she had me over, she offered me black coffee thick enough to be tar, and bitter chocolate—to go with my sunny personality, she said.”
Muscles loosening at the normality, she grinned. “What did you do to provoke her?”
“Nothing,” was the suspiciously quick response.
Illium’s shoulders shook.
“So,” she said, biting back a laugh of her own, “any of the team spot the Refuge?”
“Nope.” Vivek wheeled himself to in front of the first screen. “Now, I’m going to test if I can see it.”
“Because you know where it is”—she nodded slowly—“know the precise spot where to look.”
Illium leaned his hip against the worktable. “Exactly.”
In strict terms, Vivek was too young a vampire to have any data on the Refuge, but he was different from the usual vampire in two important ways. The first was that because he’d been paralyzed when he was Made, he’d stayed immobile for a considerable period of time.
Vampirism healed by altering a person’s cells; it wasn’t a magic pill.
In Vivek’s case, that meant he’d gone through the initial “out-of-control” or “proto-bloodlust” phase without any physical outlet. The healers had worried he’d go insane, and she knew he’d had intensive sessions with them prior to his Making where they’d stressed the importance of developing iron-clad mental control.
Vivek had succeeded at such speed that the most senior of the healers, Keir, had come to check that his transition had actually been successful.
“Never have I heard of a vampire so composed at this stage of the process,” the worried healer had said, the deceptively youthful lines of his face heavy with concern.
Elena hadn’t stopped Keir, wanting Vivek to have the best possible care, but she’d known the reason for his control.
“I learned to swallow my screams quickly, Ellie,” he’d told her one quiet day in his former subterranean domain of the Cellars. “A kid who can’t move, one whose parents have dumped him at an institution where he has no one to advocate for him . . . well, no one cares if he screams—or they care only to shut him up.”
Throw in that he was hunter-born but had never been able to exercise those furious instincts, and stifling his emotions and needs wasn’t a problem for Vivek—which of course was a whole different issue. But his control paired with the fact he’d entered the Tower as the genius head of the Guild’s surveillance operations meant no one in Raphael’s team had ever considered him “young.”
It would’ve been stupid not to utilize V’s skills, especially when Elena knew his word, once given, was unbreakable—and he’d vowed loyalty to Raphael. He also had a man crush on Raphael’s spymaster, Jason. The black-winged angel, in turn, treated Vivek as his right hand. Vivek pretended to be normal about that, but Elena was sure he did a secret happy dance when no one was looking.
Now, there was no laughter. She and Illium watched in unforgiving silence as Vivek went through the relevant images, having already discarded the ones Illium had added so the techs wouldn’t get suspicious about his focus on one particular region.
“No,” Vivek said at last. “Can’t see it.”
Elena exhaled, stomach muscles unclenching.
“Only problem I can see is here.” Vivek tapped the lower left corner of the screen. “It’s an echo. Can you see it? An image on an image.”
Frowning, Elena stared, but he had to zoom in and point out the exact parameters before she could make out the shape of it. “What does that mean?”